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Rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad who have lamented for much of this year the difficulties of fighting the Syrian Air Force have displayed two new weapons that could alter their antiaircraft campaign. In photographs recently posted online, two fighters were shown holding modern variants of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

The Brown Moses blog, which has been carefully following videos that have circulated from the Syrian conflict, put up a post a short while ago detailing what the blogger, Eliot Higgins, described initially as SA-14 and SA-24 antiaircraft missiles.

Matt Schroeder, an analyst following missile proliferation at the Federation of American Scientists, was almost certain that the SA-24 description was correct, but he questioned the first call, saying that the system identified as an SA-14 actually appears to be an SA-16. (Mr. Higgins has since updated his post to label the first missile as an SA-16.) The importance of these finds is the same either way, because rebel acquisition of any such new-generation missile, be they SA-14s, SA-16s, SA-18s or SA-24s, would be a significant upgrade. Previously, rebels have been seen only with SA-7s, an earlier, much less capable variant in the former Soviet Union’s suite of portable heat-seekers.

It has long been known that the Syrian military possessed more than SA-7s, and proliferation experts and security analysts have worried over the potential risks to commercial aviation if these missiles slipped from state hands. So this development, the apparent capture of complete SA-16 and SA-24 systems, will bear watching. If these weapons are turned toward Syrian military aircraft, then supporters of the uprising will have reason to hail them, and Syrian military pilots will have new grounds for worry on their next sorties. But if these are sold — and weapons of this sort are often said to fetch four- and five-figure dollar sums on black markets — and fired at commercial aircraft, then the consequences and regional security implications of the war in Syria will have become much worse.

This is especially true if the second missile really is an SA-24, one of the world’s most modern heat-seeking missiles and the subject of quite a scare this year in Libya, as we wrote about on At War in May.

It is too soon to know how this ends. But for now, one of the pictures freshly circulating from Syria is an apparent new marker in the missile proliferation. As Mr. Schroeder notes, “As far as I know, this is the first SA-24 Manpads ever photographed outside of state control.”

Throughout this year, as fighting intensified in Syria and antigovernment fighters grew in numbers and in strength, it had seemed inevitable that they would acquire heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles and turn them against the Syrian military aircraft.

Two videos recently posted on YouTube suggest that what had been expected is now occurring.

The first video, embedded below and posted today, shows what would appear to be a two-man hunter-killer team with an SA-7, waiting for an aircraft from hiding behind a building. Matthew Schroeder, an analyst who covers missile proliferation and the arms trade at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, noted “the glint of the missile’s seeker head, so the missile is in the tube.” This, along with the visible battery and grip stock, indicates that the system is complete.The man with the SA-7 does not loiter; he is soon picked up by another man on a light motorcycle.

The second video shows what appears to be a weapon of the same class being fired at a passing fixed-wing jet. The video is not perfect. And it is not possible in the jerky and grainy video to determine which type of missile is in use, but at about 2:02 its audio seems to capture the sound of a missile’s launching and then shows the telltale corkscrew signature of the weapon through the air.

The missile appears to miss and – from here things become less clear – it is possible that the video shows lingering flares from the area where the missile traveled in flight. This might be the signature of a countermeasure system in the targeted aircraft, which dumped the flares to confuse and thwart the missile’s seeker head.

Mr. Spleeters has set up and maintains a map of sightings of man-portable air-defense systems, or Manpads (to use the security world’s clunky acronym) in Syria. This has become something of an Internet trap line for missile sightings, and a reader that Mr. Spleeters does not know, Mads Dahl (@massdall), alerted him to these new videos.

The videos have not been verified. Their contents cannot be readily confirmed. But they do appear authentic and to show what analysts have expected to see for some time: evidence of Manpads in use by Syria’s rebels.

A few points of context can help decipher what the sightings might mean.

First, the SA-7 is an old system. Many commentators tend to say that because it is old, its battery might lack adequate charge to activate the system, acquire a target and initiate the launching. In other words, old SA-7s might not fire. That may be so, but there is ample evidence that many old SA-7s do in fact fire, as was seen last year in Libya, where SA-7s from the 1980s were captured by fighters opposed to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and fired several times.

While battery life is an issue worth considering, a more relevant issue for the conflict might be the capabilities of the weapon. The SA-7 is an early Soviet entrant into the Manpads field. It is a dated system, it can be employed from a narrower engagement window than a more up-to-date system, and it is vulnerable to countermeasures. These systems are generally regarded as being less effective against modern military jets than they are against helicopters, or, for that matter, civilian aircraft.

The above reasons are among many reasons why aviation security circles worry intensely over the potential spread of SA-7s from any nation that holds them, and why many Western countries have encouraged militaries to consider destroying the old stock. After all, what value to a modern state is a weapon that has limited utility in war, but could be a terrible weapon for a terrorist or inexperienced guerrilla who turns an SA-7 toward a lumbering passenger jet?

Second, Manpads are not the only means of bringing down aircraft. Many heavy machine guns were designed for this purpose, and can work well against lower-elevation targets, as has been seen at the Abu Ad Duhur air base and in this video, which shows, at 0:22, a helicopter assuming the glide path of a pallet of cement blocks after apparently being struck on a rotor by a machine-gun round.

Facebook.comA complete SA-7 system shown in a screen grab from the Facebook profile of Obaida Elwani.

For the first time since the conflict in Syria began last year, an activist opposed to President Bashar al-Assad has publicly presented possible evidence that the antigovernment forces have obtained a heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile.

Caveats are in order, because it is impossible to tell from the Facebook page when and where the image was made. The image has been composed too tightly to confirm that it was shot in Aleppo, and the date is not clear. But if it is legitimate, it lends weight to a report last week by Richard Engel of NBC News about the alleged transfer over the Turkish border of nearly two dozen shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to the rebels.

Whether the SA-7 in the photograph is functional, or how effective an SA-7 would be against Syrian military aircraft, is also unknown. The SA-7 is an old system; its heat-seeking head can be thwarted by countermeasures on many modern military aircraft. And fighters planning to use the system effectively would need training, including on how to select the best angles for attacking aircraft; it is not possible to tell from this image whether the system is in even reasonably competent hands. That said, Syria’s military helicopters, judging from the abundant footage of their activities in recent weeks, could be vulnerable to such weapons – even to old variants like the SA-7, which would also reasonably be expected to change Syrian pilots’ perceptions of the risks of sorties into areas where rebels with SA-7s are present.

In other words, this is potentially a development worth following as the battle for Aleppo grinds on.

Sometimes an article on the arms beat makes a claim that both demands attention and merits a deeper dive. The article excerpted below, posted earlier this year on Aviation Week’s Web site, was this kind of read. It began:

“Fears that some of the world’s most sophisticated antiaircraft weapons that disappeared from government warehouses in Libya would end up in the hands of stateless insurgent are being realized.

At least some of the roughly 480 high-performance SA-24 “Grinch” shoulder-launched missiles that disappeared during the Libyan uprising have reappeared in the hands of insurgents on the borders of Israel, senior Israeli officials say.

The advanced weapons were smuggled out of Libya to Iran. From there the supply line split, with some weapons going to Syria and finally to the military wing of the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon. Others were smuggled into Egypt and then to Hamas in Gaza.

“They are in the Gaza Strip,” an Israeli official tells Aviation Week. “I don’t know in what numbers. They also are in Lebanon.”

KB MashynostroyeniyaA complete SA-24 manpads system.

Any article about militants obtaining “some of the world’s most sophisticated antiaircraft weapons” is bound to gain notice. But this article was interesting for another reason. Two words leaped out: shoulder-launched.

The weapon at right is a complete shoulder-launched SA-24, an advanced Russian antiaircraft weapon system that is both highly portable and extremely dangerous. Since September, several news organizations have repeated the same claim: that such heat-seeking, man-portable SA-24s have been finding their way from Libya’s unsecured depots toward terrorists’ hands. These reports would seem to confirm one of the great worries in aviation security and counterterrorism circles: that a group like Hezbollah or Al Qaeda could gain access to state-of the-art military weapons with which they could down a civilian airliner.

If the missiles, which are often called “Stinger equivalents” in news reports, really were in Libya, it would make an already bleak situation with unsecured conventional arms there substantially worse. (This site has covered extensively the threat of Libya’s much older stock of SA-7 antiaircraft missiles and their spread. For details, go here or here.)

Proof of shoulder-fired SA-24s in Libya would also reorder the West’s understanding of Russian arms exports in the past decade. Russia’s Kolomna Machine-Building Design Bureau is the sole manufacturer of the SA-24, and it has emphatically denied selling this class of SA-24 missile to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. That denial stood in sharp contrast to the Kremlin’s open acknowledgment of its sale of shoulder-launched SA-24s to Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Any evidence of a surreptitious transfer to North Africa would raise fresh questions about Moscow’s arms-trafficking behavior since the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, when international efforts to contain this class of weapon were redoubled. And it would suggest grounds for greater worry. If Russia shipped these weapons to Libya, and then bluntly lied about the sale, where else might it have sent them, too?

Now hold those thoughts. The problem with reports of those shoulder-launched SA-24s flowing from Libya is that they appear, on the available evidence, to be false. Libya, as near as the records and the work of dozens of researchers, journalists and security contractors has shown, did not possess shoulder-launched SA-24s.

What we know the Qaddafi government possessed, shown at this link, was a larger pedestal-mounted weapon system, known as the Strelets.

The Strelets, like many Libyan weapons that left state custody and could now be available on black or gray markets, is certainly grounds for grave concern. Even though the historical data (more on this below) indicates that such larger and more complex antiaircraft weapons have not been successfully used by terrorists against civilian aircraft in the past, that assessment would provide no comfort if a pedestal-mounted Strelets were to down a passenger airliner on its approach to say, Tripoli, Nairobi, Beirut or Tunis.

It is difficult to assess confidently the risks now posed by the Strelets in Colonel Qaddafi’s former stock: For one, it remains an open technical question whether the accompanying missiles could be adapted to shoulder fire. (More on that in a supplemental post here.) But it is important to talk about what we are actually talking about. Shipping documents found in Libya show that Russia shipped at least hundreds of SA-24 missiles for the Strelets launchers to Libya. But the reports echoing around the world often focused on the more menacing, and more portable, shoulder-fired SA-24 system. And to date, there has been no evidence its existence in Libya.

The Initial Report

The meme asserting otherwise began in earnest Sept. 7 with a post on a CNN blog that the network broadcast as an exclusive.

The headline read, “Libyan Missiles Looted.” The report began:

“A potent stash of Russian-made surface-to-air missiles is missing from a huge Tripoli weapons warehouse amid reports of weapons looting across war-torn Libya. They are Grinch SA-24 shoulder-launched missiles, also known as Igla-S missiles, the equivalent of U.S.-made Stinger missiles.”

“A CNN team and Human Rights Watch found dozens of empty crates marked with packing lists and inventory numbers that identified the items as Igla-S surface-to-air missiles.”

The Human Rights Watch researcher, and CNN’s source, was Peter Bouckaert, a veteran investigator in conflict zones who, as part of his organization’s efforts to bring attention to the perils of conventional weapons stockpiles in Libya, had found a single empty SA-24 crate and shipping document in that same Tripoli warehouse on Sept. 6. (Other empty crates that CNN mentioned had contained other types of munitions, including SA-7s, the earlier generation of shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile that verifiably was in Qaddafi’s possession, and has vanished in untold numbers.)

Mr. Bouckaert promptly informed Western journalists of his find. And he initially insisted that these weapons were what is known in nonproliferation circles as man-portable air defense systems, or manpads — in other words, shoulder-launched weapons.

Manpads are a weapon of special concern because they are compact, easy to smuggle and relatively simple to use, especially against slow and predictable targets like a civilian jetliner taking off or landing. A complete manpads system typically requires three interconnecting parts — a narrow tube containing the missile, a battery about the size of a tennis ball that provides power, and a grip stock that balances on a shooter’s shoulder and holds the trigger.

While there are superficial similarities between shoulder-launched SA-7s and SA-24s, there are also troubling differences. Unlike the SA-7, which is a first-generation weapon based on decades-old technology, the SA-24 is a fully updated system. It can be fired effectively at aircraft head-on, from the side, or from the rear, and has features to overcome the countermeasures on modern military aircraft designed to confuse and thwart heat-seeking missiles. It also has a longer range, a proximity fuse and a larger warhead. It is, in short, one of the graver threats in the manpads class.

But there is the catch: the SA-24 missiles and tubes found in Libya, for the Strelets, were not part of a system to be fired from the shoulder. If history is a guide, they pose a different magnitude of threat — in part because they are more difficult to smuggle. Matthew Schroeder, an analyst who follows manpads proliferation for the Federation of American Scientists, said his review of the history of surface-to-air missile attacks could not find an example of a vehicle-mounted missile being used successfully by a terrorist group. “Open-source documents suggest that most if not all terrorist surface-to-air missile attacks on civilian aircraft were committed with shoulder-fired systems, not crew-portable or vehicle-mounted systems,” he wrote, by e-mail.

What the Libyan Depots Contained

When war erupted in Libya in early 2011, a year of arms spotting began. Security analysts scoured the available materials to tally up what was in government depots, which now have changed hands. Simultaneously, journalists and nongovernment organizations began looking closely at weapons carried by both sides. All manner of former Qaddafi military equipment has been seen in the field, in makeshift museums, in old stockpiles, or in refuse heaps that sometimes contained packaging and shipment papers.

Almost immediately, the presence of SA-24s was established. But every specimen spotted was of the two-tube, vehicle-mounted variety, like those shown in the pictures below.

C. J. Chivers/The New York TimesDetail of an SA-24 battery.

Damien SpleetersSA-24 parts on the floor of a building occupied by a militia in Libya.

That system fires the same missiles and uses the same batteries as the shoulder-launched SA-24 variant. But it does not come with a grip stock. And when the Russian manufacturer was asked whether it had shipped SA-24 grip stocks to Libya, it expressly said it had not.

A senior Russian official with a long history in the arms trade told Andrew Kramer, a Moscow-based correspondent for The New York Times, that Russia had not provided Libya any shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles since the Soviet Union’s collapse — which was before the SA-24 was brought into production.

Cautious arms researchers do not readily take governments or arms exporters at their words. So even while firm denials circulated from Moscow, many people kept investigating. Still, no public evidence has surfaced, beyond these echoing news reports, of shoulder-fired SA-24 missiles loose in Libya, as Stingers were in southwest Asia after the United States provided them to anti-Soviet Afghan fighters, decades back.

So why does the claim keep appearing? Does someone know something everyone else does not?

Ben Wedeman, the CNN correspondent who reported the find, said by telephone that beyond the crate and shipping document that Mr. Bouckaert showed his crew last September, CNN had no additional information for its report. “As far as manpads go, we never actually saw anything to indicate they were there, he said. Speaking about Mr. Bouckaert’s information, he added, “We didn’t have the technical expertise to go back and check what he told us.” Mr. Wedeman said he did see, elsewhere in Libya, the SA-24 vehicle-mounted system.

Aviation Week was also unambiguous when asked about whether it had evidence of SA-24 manpads in Libya. “The answer is a definite no,” wrote David Fulghum, one of the reporters who wrote the article cited at the top of this post. “The Russians didn’t supply the manpads version to Libya. I’ve never had any indication there was anything but the twin-mount launcher in Libya.”

Mr. Fulghum said the news in his article was the indications that the missiles themselves had traveled from Libya to Hamas and Hezbollah, and, given the history of manufacturing jury-rigged weapons in the region, the presence of an updated heat-seeking missile among these groups could pose grave risks.

Human Rights Watch also said it had no evidence of shoulder-launched SA-24s in Libya, though last September Mr. Bouckaert had briefly thought otherwise.

On the night before the CNN report, Mr. Bouckaert was working without full support. Mark Hiznay, the Human Rights Watch arms analyst who typically vets the organization’s finds in the field and makes or confirms identification, was on a trans-Atlantic flight and out of reach. Mr. Bouckaert approached The New York Times, saying that he had found an SA-24 manpads crate and that it had been looted. He said CNN would be doing the story, and invited The New York Times to follow up on his find, too.

Upon looking at the document from the crate, which showed that SA-24 batteries and missile tubes had been shipped from Russia to Libya, The New York Times informed Mr. Bouckaert and Human Rights Watch that it would not be running an article about the SA-24s, as there was no evidence of grip stocks. The find of the SA-24 crate and shipping document did not go past what had been already known — that Libya possessed the vehicle-mounted system.

Instead, Rod Nordland, a correspondent then in Tripoli, set to work writing an article about the discovery of more unsecured SA-7s, the ongoing problems with weapons generally, and the interim government’s limited ability to secure its lethal inheritances.

CNN then weighed in, asserting that SA-24 Stinger-equivalents had been looted.

Mr. Bouckaert said in a recent e-mail that while he had initially mistakenly told The New York Times and CNN that the SA-24 crate he found had contained shoulder-fired missiles, he came to understand his mistake during that first night, and did not repeat his assertion that they were manpads when he showed journalists around the same warehouse. He said did not hype his find, and specifically explained the subtleties to journalists.

There was some confusion caused the evening before we went public, when I mistakenly assumed in conversations with CNN and the NYT that the SA-24s were manpads, instead of vehicle-mounted versions. … When we took the press to the site the next day, I carefully referred to the SA-24s as surface-to-air missiles, not manpads, and made clear that they could be either used with a vehicle mount or grip stock, and that those firing mechanisms were not found (so we couldn’t be conclusive as to which system was shipped).

By this time, the disappearance of shoulder-launched SA-24 missiles was becoming an accepted claim, and was picked up by many Web sites and news outlets.

And yet thus far, the credible sources with a field presence in Libya agree: the only heat-seeking, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile to have been found in Libya have been variants of the SA-7.

As the At War blog knows too well, from firsthand experience, arms identification can be very difficult. Precision often proves elusive, especially with weapons that have been manufactured in several configurations and have undergone multiple production cycles, as in the case of Russian-designed manpads. Add in the secrecy that surrounds trafficking and the specifications of advanced weapons, and the field is vulnerable to error. (Often military units make identification mistakes, and many experts will puzzle or disagree while trying to come to consensus on what might seem a straightforward find.)

Human Rights Watch and Mr. Bouckaert have been providing important fact finding and analysis on the many problems posed by weapons proliferation, and Mr. Wedeman has been one of the most consistently brave, relevant and energetic journalists working in Libya. The mistakes here are of a familiar sort. And the value of the shoulder-fired SA-24 reports, and how they have persistently regenerated, is that they serve to remind those who follow these themes just how difficult this all can be, especially when moving quickly or when not vetting unusual finds against multiple independent sources.

An article in The New York Times last week discussed an American proposal to buy heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from the many armed groups and people in Libya who are holding them. Even the older variants of these missiles, known in nonproliferation circles as Manpads, are a threat to civilian aviation; the American proposal is intended to take as many of them as possible out of circulation, with hopes of trimming the number available on black markets.

All of the Manpads identified to date in Libya have been variants of the SA-7, an early Soviet-designed variant of a class of weapon that would eventually evolve to the American-made Stinger and other similarly frightening but lesser-known models made in several nations. The article noted that the West’s working estimate for the number of missiles imported by the Libyan military during Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s long rule runs to 20,000. But that is a rough guess at the quantity imported — not the quantity on the loose after the war.

… the number now missing is a fraction of that. Precise estimates are impossible, officials say, because no one is sure how many the military still possessed at the outset of the uprising or later after months of fighting.

Some of the missiles were fired in training and in war. Others were disassembled by rebels, who used their tubes as makeshift launchers for other looted ordnance. Many of the missing missiles were looted, either by rebels or would-be profiteers. Many more were destroyed in bunkers that were hit in airstrikes.

One line in there — about rebels using tubes as makeshift launchers — provides the background you will need to interpret the short video below. In it, Kevin Dawes, an unusual battlefield wanderer from the United States, has made a record of the phenomenon of Manpads being repurposed for ground-to-ground war.Read more…

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